The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 37, no. 4

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Publishers with a keen business sense and altruistic goals for the future of
native art hired the best talent and employed the media capable of the
cheapest, largest editions. Their patronage set off a spiral of challenges
between artists and technicians that produced, by 1890, the most sophisticated,
widely circulated illustrated press in the world. American periodicals
encouraged the virtuosity of wood engravers like Henry Marsh, they built
Thomas Nast into a political force, and they brought Abbey's illustrations
to the doors of admirers as distant as Vincent Van Gogh.
The power of this late nineteenth-century phenomenon drew the
diverse talents of Eakins, Homer, and John La Farge into the related fields of
illustration, watercolor, and printmaking, and it inspired a host of artists'
clubs promoting "minor" media. The proliferation of these specialized
groups indicates the new sophistication and ambition of the American art
community after the Civil War. These clubs wanted to educate artists and
collectors about watercolor, or etching, or pastel, and they had a professional
interest in establishing the legitimacy, importance, and expressive power of
these media. Their campaign succeeded as the intimacy and spontaneity of
impressionistic art gained favor, and works on paper were prized for their
revelation of process and inspiration. Younger artists abandoned the
popular in search of an individualistic avant-garde, and techniques like
monotype-a printing process that perversely makes an edition of onewere
eagerly cultivated. The new patrons of the eighties and nineties shared
these tastes, and were attracted by the domestic scale and modest prices of
drawings, watercolors, and prints. Given the strong competition from
foreign art, it soon became clear that American artists were more likely to
sell a work on paper than an oil, and interest in alternate media grew.
A century has passed. The split between popular and avant-garde art
that opened around 1880 widened as the most adventuresome artists
willfully detached themselves from the mainstream, and as photography
changed the nature of popular illustration and printmaking. Just as
woodcuts replaced hand-decorated fraktur certificates and lithographed
mourning pictures replaced watercolor and needlework originals, the
photograph or the photographic reproduction eliminated the engraver and
often the draftsman, too. Photographic techniques have realized the
democratic dream of the Art-Union by providing full-color reproductions
of Homer's watercolors for the walls of any home, but they have also
endangered today's regional artists by throwing them into a discouraging
marketplace competition with the greatest art of the past.
Some innovative artists, like Will Bradley, adapted to the machine
age and exploited commercial techniques with great elegance and force.
Bradley's work joined a design tradition running from William Morris to
Walter Gropius that has made the poster into the Currier & Ives solution of
the twentieth century and has inspired a renaissance in printmaking during
the last two decades. Others, in reaction to the chilly and alienating excesses
of the modern aesthetic, have rediscovered the intimate scale and individualized
touch of drawings. Today, the separation of the personal, private
expression and the democratic, public statement has become extreme, but
the opposition lurks already in the nineteenth-century confrontation of
Nocturne and The Favorite Cat, where Whistler's nuance, suggestion, and
idiosyncrasy meet Currier's unnerving simplicity. The Metropolitan's great
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C. E W MIELATZ Bowling Green, 1910
Mielatz, one of the first etchers to
celebrate the buildings and localities
of New York, experimented with
various processes in the medium. In
this view of Bowling Green and old
"Shipmasters' Row," (now the site of
the Custom House), he created the
effect of pastels by applying colored
inks before printing.